Phenomenology of Religion and Cognitive Religious Studies

Abstract

The phenomenology of religion and cognitive religious studies are perceived in scientific circles as two fundamentally different strategies for studying religion, since the reductionist basis of cognitive religious studies does not agree with the anti-reductionism of the phenomenological tradition. Despite this difference, the article substantiates the idea that these traditions have intersections, the pres­ence of which helps to take a fresh look at the study of religion in the past and present. Firstly, it is the place that both programs occupy in religious studies, their claim to be key strategies for understanding religion as a whole. Secondly, it is a common philosophical basis: both traditions ideologically go back to the basic principles of Kantian epistemology. Thirdly, it is evolutionism, the whole system of argumentation of cognitive religious studies is explicitly based on it, implic­itly it is present in all classical theories of phenomenologists of religion. Fourth, a two-process model that asserts the existence of two cognitive processes that generate two corresponding levels of religious life: intuitive and reflexive. The presence of these intersections allows to consider the logic of the study of re­ligion in a different way: the difference of research strategies on the principle of reductionism/anti-reductionism is not sufficiently heuristic. It is concluded that the commonality of ideas about the two levels of religion, shared by both tradi­tions, confirms that phenomenologists and cognitive scientists, moving in com­pletely different ways, apparently discovered a fundamental feature of the “hu­man” dimension of religious life.